Adrift (Excerpt)
Transcript of Adrift (Excerpt)
-
8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)
1/5
-
8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)
2/5
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Griffin
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,
Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are
trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for author or third-party websites or their content.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For
information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions
Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-0-545-70939-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 16 17 18 19
Printed in the U.S.A. 23
First edition, August 2015
Book design by Yaffa Jaskoll and Carol Ly
-
8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)
3/5
1
SAILOR’S ALMANAC, LONG-RANGE FORECAST, NORTH ATLANTIC
CORRIDOR: Summer will be lovely with mild winds through
August, heading into hurricane season.
The surfers called it The End for its killer waves. To everyone else it
was the end of Long Island. Montauk. It’s a town of beaches and
bluffs on the tip of the south fork. My best friend, John Costello,
and I landed summer jobs at a state park out there. My parentsowned a flower shop, and one of their customers was a big deal in
the parks department. I’d just finished junior year. The plan was to
apply early decision to Yale as a forestry major. I dreamed of being
a ranger in the Utah canyons or Alaska glaciers. I had to get out of
the city. Everywhere I looked I saw Mr. Costello’s ghost.The name of the park was Heron Hills. I fixed boardwalks and
lifeguard chairs and the dock struts rotting away in the saltwater
-
8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)
4/5
2
marsh. When the tide was out, the seaweed crackled beneath a sun
hot enough to melt your mind. My head ached no matter how much
Gatorade I drank. I loved it, being deep in the quiet, near the water.From the bluffs I saw the earth’s curve.
After work on the hottest day in August I met up with John in
the park’s vehicle maintenance shop. He’d been working in gas sta-
tions since the day after his dad’s funeral, when he grabbed a job
filling tires. Iceman. That’s what everybody called him. We hadn’tbeen able to hang out as much since we started going to different
schools freshman year. I took the test for Hudson, a selective pub-
lic school in Manhattan. It was a forty-minute train ride and a
world away from Woodhull, a working-class neighborhood that
straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border. John and I grew up there,right on the borderline. The high school in Woodhull was pretty
rough, but John didn’t care. All he needed was a diploma for trade
school. He had his heart set on being an electrician, like his dad.
Not his heart, his mind. Electrical work was sensible, steady.
The vehicle maintenance shop was stifling. John hoisted anengine out of a Land Rover with two other guys. They were sweat-
ing so much they looked like they’d gone swimming. John worked
just as hard, but he was dry until one of the trucks backfired. I
flinched too.
We hit the beach and swam out past where the waves brokeand the water turned silky. We came in clear-eyed and hungry and
stopped to say hi to a man who fished from knee-deep water. He
-
8/21/2019 Adrift (Excerpt)
5/5
3
gave us a pair of blues. I smothered them with butter and hand-
mashed lemon and pan-cooked them in the fire pit behind the
trailer where we bunked.After dinner the harmonicas came out. Mr. Costello had taught
us how to play, and John was good. The stars curved out of the dusk
into the night. We never said much. We were good at being alone
together. But that night it was on my mind. “You don’t talk about it
ever,” I said. “About him.”John tended the fire with a broken slat he’d pulled from the
dune fence. “Not until you make me anyway,” he said. He checked
his beat-up Timex and headed for the trailer. “The bugs are getting
bad. Don’t fall asleep out here again.”
I buried the fire with sand. The waves caught the moonlight.One rose higher than the others, rolled toward me, and faded into
the shore. The mosquitoes chased me into the trailer. I cracked
my laptop to study for a little while before bed. I was taking a certi-
fied first responder course with the lifeguards. I wanted to know
how to bring somebody back to life. I was learning what I alreadyknew: Most times you can’t. Anyway, it would look good on my
Yale application.